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A two-state solution for San Francisco
It's satire. I think. -)
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/humor-san-franciscogentrificationtwostates.html
San Franciscans woke up Tuesday to find the local tech community vanished, apparently raptured away into the clouds. But anyone who thought the long civic nightmare of hoodied millionaires and skyrocketing rents was over was wrong. The digipreneurial class had simply decamped for the day 45 miles south to Apple HQ in Cupertino, like salmon to their spawning grounds, to gape at such wonders as a larger iPhone (like a mini iPad Mini but with a phone number!) and a less dorky smartwatch. Whereas salmon shoot their seed into gravel beds and promptly die, the tech elite shot theirs into Twitter and returned home flushed and radiant, readier than ever to innovate, disrupt and gentrify....
Analogies with ethnic conflict come closer to the mark, for protesters vomiting onto the windshields of Google buses and coders riding inside are not searchers of a shared language. They are distinct peoples, locked in enmity. They do not need a civics lesson about “getting from the self-improving pluribus to the self-sovereign unum”; they need separation and self-determination. A city with two poleis needs a bipolar solution, by which I don’t mean a moody or erratic one. I mean something stable and lasting, like the Middle East peace process, which set up a two-state vision 21 years ago and hasn’t gone anywhere. Let’s do this, people....
Since the whole point is to save San Francisco’s soul and preserve its character, and since diversity is key to both, there would be no neighborhood deportations or forcible transfers. Instead, the two populations simply slither through and past one another, mutually insulated, like electrical currents in the thicket of wires behind your home entertainment system. Think Hebron but without the short circuits and flare-ups. To some extent, this is already happening. What my plan does is formalize it through discrete but interlocking legal, economic and judicial systems and a form of electrified cattle fencing that does what it needs to do without spoiling the city’s views or its sense of togetherness.
Consider, for example, the tech bus system currently in place. It’s gotten bad press, but as the shrieking subsides and the vomit dries, we can see it for what it is: a great example of how a healthy bipolis (pronounced BIPP-uh-liss) with overlapping infrastructures can work. Just as residents now have buses boardable only by tech workers stopping every 10 minutes at the same bus stops where Muni buses boardable by regular people stop every hour or two or three or never, they could also have:
• Separate ambulance networks operating out of the same dispatch center, offering different levels of service but sharing overhead
• Queue-jumping codes for 911 calls
• Elite public schools for tech offspring, which foster diversity by inviting other children to Skype silently into the classroom as auditors
• Smart streetlamps that turn on only when a tech worker walks beneath them, but whose momentary glow allows those in adjacent cantons to get their bearings at night
Analogies with ethnic conflict come closer to the mark, for protesters vomiting onto the windshields of Google buses and coders riding inside are not searchers of a shared language. They are distinct peoples, locked in enmity. They do not need a civics lesson about “getting from the self-improving pluribus to the self-sovereign unum”; they need separation and self-determination. A city with two poleis needs a bipolar solution, by which I don’t mean a moody or erratic one. I mean something stable and lasting, like the Middle East peace process, which set up a two-state vision 21 years ago and hasn’t gone anywhere. Let’s do this, people....
Since the whole point is to save San Francisco’s soul and preserve its character, and since diversity is key to both, there would be no neighborhood deportations or forcible transfers. Instead, the two populations simply slither through and past one another, mutually insulated, like electrical currents in the thicket of wires behind your home entertainment system. Think Hebron but without the short circuits and flare-ups. To some extent, this is already happening. What my plan does is formalize it through discrete but interlocking legal, economic and judicial systems and a form of electrified cattle fencing that does what it needs to do without spoiling the city’s views or its sense of togetherness.
Consider, for example, the tech bus system currently in place. It’s gotten bad press, but as the shrieking subsides and the vomit dries, we can see it for what it is: a great example of how a healthy bipolis (pronounced BIPP-uh-liss) with overlapping infrastructures can work. Just as residents now have buses boardable only by tech workers stopping every 10 minutes at the same bus stops where Muni buses boardable by regular people stop every hour or two or three or never, they could also have:
• Separate ambulance networks operating out of the same dispatch center, offering different levels of service but sharing overhead
• Queue-jumping codes for 911 calls
• Elite public schools for tech offspring, which foster diversity by inviting other children to Skype silently into the classroom as auditors
• Smart streetlamps that turn on only when a tech worker walks beneath them, but whose momentary glow allows those in adjacent cantons to get their bearings at night
